As modern TVs get more complicated, with increasing services and applications available to the user, and with the limited navigational capabilities of the remote control, it becomes increasingly hard to find the items the user is interested in. The number of conventional TV channel services available today already potentially occupies over 50 channels. To make matters worse, the user often has to search and guess where a particular setting might reside in the television's menu system. Additionally, when Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is considered along with user applications such as “Widgets”, the television set's operation is greatly complicated over the level of complexity of older conventional analog television sets.
Google desktop is a good example of a searching tool on a home computer. However, Google Desktop is a text-based search tool which looks for files, not applications or TV channels.